5 ms·
If you don't think about it, vacuum marination is appealing: let's try to squeeze the marinade into the meat! This article is about why that doesn't work. What
by jmilloy 3y ago
If you don't think about it, vacuum marination is appealing: let's try to squeeze the marinade into the meat! This article is about why that doesn't work.
What is missing is a basic explanation of how marinating or brining does work, which should be at the beginning. Even the green-dye test is missing the obvious case where you marinade for say 24 hours.
For one, I think brining and marinating is more than just tasty molecules diffusing into the meat. Informally, the proteins will dissolve or denature in the brine over time. It should be obvious, then, that the vacuum has no impact on this chemical process, but also that this dye test doesn't show anything about this process either.
Second, and I want to know more about this if it's not correct, my understanding is that the salty brine or marinade actually draws water out of the meat at first as due to osmosis trying to achieve equilibrium. Then, the salty marinade is drawn back into the meat, again trending towards equilibrium. It's not just a simple process of random diffusion as this article suggests, but osmosis across a gradient. And osmosis actually does occur faster with higher pressure, but just not enough to matter here. I'm also curious if salt helps the dye at all.
- stevenwoo 3y agoJ. Kenji López-Alt documents trying a bunch of different methods/liquids/lengths of time of marinating in The Food Lab book and it just doesn't do much of anything IIRC.
- tptacek 3y agoThe green dye experiment, from the same site: https://genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/dye.html https://genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/dye.html ... supporting the logic that marination is mostly a surface treatment, and thus there's not that much point in waiting a full day to marinate something, but rather just enough time for the marinade to "penetrate" the surface layer that's as far as it's going anyways. Which is why, for instance, if you read a Kenji recipe, it's going to suggest marinating for "at least 30 minutes".
- jmilloy 3y agoOh cool, thanks for the full dye link. I think it may be that brining in an adequate salt solution is sufficiently different from this kind of surface marination.
- jmilloy 3y agoActually, I thought about this some more, and if marinating for 30 minutes is sufficient to basically maximize or saturate the surface penetration, then comparing the vacuum to no vacuum at 1 hour is pointless. Better to compare at say 5 or 10 minutes.
- bambax 3y agoYes, the marinade doesn't go very far beyond the surface; and that's why one should increase the surface by making many small pieces out of one big steak (or breast, etc.) It won't change the total marinating time but the result is going to be more interesting.
- nsxwolf 3y agoThis is why kabobs are so good.
- stickfigure 3y agoThere are a couple more options. Shopper's Corner (a boutique market in Santa Cruz) has the most amazing marinated meats I've ever tasted, and their trick is that they run them overnight in a vacuum tumbler. Presumably a regular tumbler would have the same effect. When I lived there, one of my favorites was a teriyaki ribeye. It was obvious from color that the marination fully penetrated the meat - steaks have striations and tumbling opens them up. So you can get a lot more surface area mechanically. There's also the option of "mechanical tenderization" - basically poking a zillion holes.
- bambax 3y ago> poking a zillion holes Yes, I have something like this https://zestbillings.com/cdn/shop/products/71yi8tb_l7L._AC_SL1500_1400x.jpg https://zestbillings.com/cdn/shop/products/71yi8tb_l7L._AC_S... But I've found that making bite-sized morsels is much simpler.
- Semaphor 3y agoYeah, this is also explained in the book I can highly recommend: The Science of Cooking [0]. It has stuff like this and many more tricks and background. It’s absolutely pop-science, so don’t expect a dissertation, but it’s great for home cooks. [0]:https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19723027W/The_Science_of_Cooking?edition=key%3A/books/OL28641078M https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19723027W/The_Science_of_Coo...
- akerl_ 3y agoWhy would osmosis overcorrect one way and then invert, absent some additional external force?
- jmilloy 3y agoGreat question. There's an explanation here. It sounds like this only applies to dry brining, in other words, a wet brine or salty marinade would skip the first stage. Dry-brining cuts out the unnecessary added water by using the natural moisture content of the meat to create a concentrated brine that, when given enough time, is naturally absorbed back into the meat before cooking. Season a steak with kosher salt, and within a few minutes, you will witness osmosis at work: Liquid from the steak will bead up on the surface of the meat, drawn out by the salt. Wait another ten minutes, and that liquid from the beef will have started to dissolve the salt, forming a concentrated brine https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-dry-brine
- SamBam 3y agoYeah, I've never really night that explanation even with a dry brine. With a dry brine it's still going to draw water out to equilibrium. There's no real reason it would overshoot. Mixing with the salt and becoming a wet brine will still mean it's much saltier than the inside, and so won't draw back inside.
- throwawaylinux 3y agoMomentum? Quantum tunneling of the flavor atoms?
- Timon3 3y ago"Quantum tunneling of the flavor atoms" sounds like the title of an amazing 80s SciFi novel dealing with the fleeting nature of life amidst a group of chefs who let themselves not be stopped by the laws of nature in pursuit of new, better food experiences.
- 3y ago
- wodenokoto 3y agoWell, you could argue the pressure/vacuum would suck the marinate deeper into the meat, thus starting the process deeper inside the tissue causing a more deep and even marination. Just playing devils advocate. I really don’t know how this works.
- jmilloy 3y agoThe tests show that this isn't what happens though.
- hurril 3y agoThe vacuum is outside the meat, though, so if anything it's bound to suck whatever is in the meat out of it.
- thomasfedb 3y agoThis is pretty much exactly what the article says doesn’t work
- xvedejas 3y agoAir pressure can have effects on chemical processes, at least when some kind of phase transition may occur between liquid and gaseous phases. I don't think that's happening here, but the vacuum could have some negligible effect on, say, drying out the meat (evaporation is faster at lower pressures)
- thomasfedb 3y agoIf we want to be particularly pedantic (and apparently I do)… the process you mention - evaporation - is better classified as a physical process (inter-molecular forces) rather than a chemical process (molecular bonds).
- xvedejas 3y agoAh yeah, I didn't mean evaporation was a chemical process, it was something in addition to that. Aside from evaporation, there are chemical processes which (for example) generate gases, which is not a phase change but a change to form a different molecule that is gaseous at the given conditions. The cool thing is that the rate of such reactions is usually dependent on the pressure.